Half of all Tor ("darknet" or "deep web" .onion) sites busted, as one guy used bitcoin.
And FBI injected a spyware in all sites to get real IP of surfers.
The "freedom hosting" hosted all these, including "tormail", a gmail-like service, popular with drug sellers of "Silk Road". How the hosting guy was identified? In forums they say it is bitcoin to blame: the guy had setup an "onion bank" on 16 July, and he got busted in a week or two.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. If police send a bitcoin to X, then just have to follow it in blockchain: X sends to Y, then to Z... at some point the guy cashed Z into dollars, and he's identified. This is why money exchangers are busted themselves, unless keeping an ID of each user, they must know the customer same as a bank or a payoneer or paxum. So when the police asks for ID of bitcoin user X, they get it.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...ibution-123789
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...-distribution/
What's cool from FBI/NSA (more probably, from their Snowden-like consultants): after the bust, they run the sites for a few days, inserting a javascript exploit in all the pages, that sent the real IP and MAC address to police servers, to identify the Tor surfers, at least those on windows with a firefox version prior to 20 June.
The feds had run busted sites before as a trap, but the "inject malware" thing is a step forward which solved the proxy limits:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/29/43...ting-operation
Actually bitcoin, tor and all technologies it seems the best friend of government and police. It was harder to bust criminals when they used only cash and handwritten paper pieces.